Heyo! I've already kinda just @ each of y'all my thanks, but I'm just popping by once again to say my thanks haha. I really appreciate all of the critique received! I appreciate the words, and seeing as y'all like me doing lineless I'll definitely try to keep giving this a shot in the future! As well as gutters. I Really Need To Adjust to Those...S/O to Arts to really reinforcing that I should do gutters HAHA

The plan is to do a followup BB for this comic to tie up the loose ends of this battle (OR END UP BEING MORE VAGUE HAHA because I Oft Fall Into That without realizing it when I get into the visualization process), but probably not anytime soon because I really want to take this time to consider what I want to do in the future with my void characters, and sort of really just do comics in my own time so I can actually enjoy the process.

But anyways, Lyme, I would love to do a rematch if you ever have the free time and want to consider doing another comic battle! Hope things are going well on your end :>

Astro: I really appreciate you trying out doing the comic fully lineless because it really exemplifies your gorgeous coloring!!!! Your backgrounds are awesome, even if the perspective is a little wonky (like in page 1, that must be a massive door). Like, the set piece on page 6 is rad!! I'm not going to complain about story details being vague because I think that's kind of your Thing now, things being all dreamlike to couple with these environments and monsters.

But please please with all your characters constantly transforming in and out, why do they gotta be hidden off screen or between panels, it's such a dang tease ;_; this isn't a quality thing this is just a me thing, SHOW ME THE COOL TRANSITIONS OR I'M GOING TO DRAW THEM MYSELF

Lyme: it's a shame you defaulted but I look forward to your next projects and potentially a BB with your side of this battle.

Astro: it's good to see you work on your borders and experiment with them, it's good you're thinking about that part of the comic more. However your borders should have more contrast and be closer to pure black to make for better dividers. The borders and gutters are meant to give us breathing room between panels so they don't all blur into one and give us a good sense of time, when the borders are smaller and similar color to the comic it blends them all together. Which does work in certain times but you have to learn how to apply it. I think you should try going back to super basic borders of full black with white gutter space in between and work with that a bit then try to experiment out from there.

I terms of writing I think the main thing you need to work on is cutting out unnecessary information, when you put too much stuff that doesn't directly benefit the story or too many scenes the reader will get confused. For example the 20xx boxes don't let us know any information vital for the story. We don't need to know the year or location of those places since in this story the flashback is being vague. You only need to let us know about those things when we're either actually experiencing that scene or we are hearing an factual recreation of that specific scene. So save that information for when we get all the details of the scene.

My favorite transition you did was the one on page 2, that was was really smooth. however in general your scene transitions should be done at the start and end of pages rather than in the middle. If you do have a scene transition in the middle, you can't have more than one scene transition per page unless it's specifically like a montage page. Page 8 goes from Kot's hideout, to the current scene, to niles' hideout, to the current scene. That is way too much way too fast and will lose the reader. All that was really needed at most was one panel flashing back with the reveal of the meta corpses showing a corpse maybe. However seeing the files, niles' hideout, and the corpse head didn't add anything to the story and because all that was in there ended up with the page being a bit too much.

Also on my first read through I didn't notice the knife. In part because there was not enough leadup to niles pulling out the knife and in part due to the odd coloring of the blade blending in with niles. important elements need to stick and need to be something that the reader can quickly understand, That type of orange is not one people typically associate with daggers so at a quick glance of the shape and colors someone can miss the dagger when it's only there for 2 and a half panels.

All that being said you're an amazing illustrator who just needs to figure out some comic writing stuff to make equally amazing comics. Of course this comic was already good and in terms of writing your character dialogue is good.

Astro: Your art is absolutely amazing, the colors and rendering are great and everything just looks so good together!! I think everyone already gave some really solid advice, all I can really think of is that the text could be a little bit bigger? Just feels a bit small to me although that’s more of a nitpick hahahh awesome stuff!!

Astro: Honesty I am just so impressed with your coloring in this comic. I loved every settings. Visually just stunning work, you should be proud!! I can see you took some notes from the previous comic about trying gutters and it worked out great. Particularly page 6! I’m a sucker for those little details. It gives a comic alot more personality and it works well with your style.

Writing wise, I’ll be honest and say I had a hard time following for some reason even tho it’s a pretty simple set up. I think others have some good tips already so I don’t know what else to add.I’ll just say to have someone you trust read over it first. To make sure the story makes sense to someone that doesn’t already know what is suppose to be happening.

Personally, I'm okay with leaving it open ended. I liked seeing Niles thinking it over at the end. It leaves me curious about what he plans to do next. The problem with void comics, is that sometimes we never get that payback for the set ups. So, it’s probably something to address sooner than later so people don’t forget about this plot element!

Art; Your stuffs gorgous Astro. The visual cues you drop, the landscapes. ITs amazing. And that one jump flashback panel is the best thing you ever done on the site.

Writing: I had no idea what I was looking at narrative wise half the time. Your transitions are to abrupt, hopping from different places to different places with no sense of transition. When its good, its good. But in the end, this felt like the same thing void does: It was a meet and greet comic with very little actually happening and no real incentive to build on the story. Biggest problem I feel is that it feels like its needs a runup/start and instead feels like its starting in the middle. We are then given a last page "This is why its happening" that in the end tells us very little and don't really offer a hook. That makes it lack impact, it doesn't draw me in for a bigger narrative. The things that kept the comic up was the little hint of something amazing and creative was the upsidedown crater city. But that was a brief glance, that in the end made everything else seem less interesting to me.

yaa boii this is what 4 weeks well-used looks like (obviously I'm gonna cheer for the outlineless comics)

I had to read it twice to get what's going on and I think you would benefit from some more extreme shades for the gutter spaces so some panels don't accidentally blend with each other the wrong way but outside of that this is aces

Astro, you gotta slow down, bruh. Your comic is so good we're gonna get spoiled rotten if we see more of this. XP But seriously, this is your best yet. I've not seen such fantastic art and intriguing mystery in a long time. After waiting for my love-addled thoughts to subside, I agree with all of Jelly's statements. ( For page 5, I did think it was a phone, then realized it was a knife, but I assumed it was one of Niles' illusory tricks. )

Okay, it was hard but I wracked my brain to find something, so here goes:Expanding on Jelly's comments about the confusing time jumps-- I think the main culprit here is the "20xx" date boxes. You normally don't see date boxes in flashbacks, especially combined with current-time character speech. And seeing the dates change so quickly is also unusual and jarring. Also, while the colors are really cool, like REALLY COOL, I think they should have been filtered to be more similar, maybe with blurs+glows, or matching hues. They'll just be like a bunch of memories being replayed, and it's no problem that we don't know what time they're from.

Finally, I wish there was more to Kot's "sales pitch" He started well, exposing his knowledge of Niles' secrets, but didn't say much beyond "I also like messing with meta-corpses" I think maybe one little sentence about what he could help with in a more tangible sense would help.

Whew! x.x In spite of everything, I absolutely enjoyed this comic. ^^ Please keep up the good work! I can't wait to see what'll happen next!

Well Astro, from an artistic standpoint this comic is fucking gorgeous. definitely one of the best looking I've seen on this site in my, admittedly, short time here, and definitely the best I've seen from you. Even so there is some inconsistency in rendering. the most glaring example is the top of page two, going from panel one, which is rendered, to panel two which is more of a flatcolor. going between those two panels completely brought me out of it. Just make sure things like shading is consistent and you should be golden. as for the writing and execution I'm alright with it up to a point. first of all is page 5. At the bottom of the page Niles suddenly has a knife and there's no indication of where at all that came from. That may be it in his hand in the previous panel but it's not at all clear what it is. it would probably help a lot of we get to see Niles actually draw the knife so we're not confused when he suddenly has one at the end of the page. besides that I found it a bit odd and confusing once the comic started jumping between time periods since we have very little context for any of them, though it is starting to make a bit more sense in subsequent readthroughs so it might not be as much an issue as I thought at first.

Also we need Thaat "Sucks to suck, boy" panel as a reaction image, I love it.

Uploaded the comic last night n' all that! I had to cut out 1 or 2 pages (Originally 10 pages, haha) because Comic Crunch Time, I'm up for sharing the WIPs if anyone wanted to know what was removed, but ultimately the pacing and writing are the first and foremost problems here for me. But nonetheless, hopefully y'all like! Thanks for wanting to battle me Lyme, it's nice to get Niles going again.

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